ModelRefs / Claude 3 Opus vs Mistral Small 3.1
Claude 3 Opus vs Mistral Small 3.1
Claude 3 Opus vs Mistral Small 3.1: side-by-side benchmarks, pricing, context windows, coding ability and deployment. Pick the right model for your stack.
Overview
Claude 3 Opus: Claude 3 Opus is Anthropic's February 2024 frontier model and the most capable of the original Claude 3 family, accepting text and image input across a 200,000-token context window. The claude-3-opus-20240229 snapshot was deprecated on 30 June 2025 and retired on Anthropic-operated platforms on 5 January 2026, with Claude Opus 4.8 named as its replacement.
Mistral Small 3.1: Mistral Small 3.1 is Mistral AI's 24-billion-parameter multimodal model, accepting text and image input across a context window of up to 128,000 tokens and published under Apache 2.0. Mistral reports inference speeds of 150 tokens per second and compares it with Gemma 3 and GPT-4o Mini in the same weight class. Its size and licence make it one of the larger models that remains practical to self-host on a single machine.
Context window: Claude 3 Opus accepts up to 200,000 tokens, Mistral Small 3.1 up to 128,000. Confirm the limit for your specific deployment channel before relying on it.
Claude 3 Opus vs Mistral Small 3.1 at a glance
| Attribute | Claude 3 Opus | Mistral Small 3.1 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Mistral AI |
| Released | 2024-02-29 | 2025-03-17 |
| Context window | 200,000 tokens | 128,000 tokens |
| Input price | $15/M tokens | $0.1/M tokens |
| Output price | $75/M tokens | $0.3/M tokens |
| Licence | Proprietary | Apache-2.0 |
| Self-hostable | No, hosted only | Yes, open weights |
| Modalities | text, vision | text, vision |
Where they differ most
- Reasoning: Claude 3 Opus 38%, Mistral Small 3.1 63%. Mistral Small 3.1 leads on this dimension.
Capability scores are ModelRefs' own derived signals, not vendor claims or benchmark results. Validate against your own workload before relying on them.
Continue your research
Use these connected ModelRefs sections to compare alternatives, inspect implementation paths, and review the evidence and governance boundaries relevant to Claude 3 Opus vs Mistral Small 3.1.
Frequently asked questions
Which is better, Claude 3 Opus or Mistral Small 3.1?
Claude 3 Opus and Mistral Small 3.1 target different workloads — see the benchmark and pricing tables for a side-by-side answer.
Is Claude 3 Opus cheaper than Mistral Small 3.1?
Compare $0.0150 vs $0.00010 on this page.